A lot of extra work has been put in due to scope creep and extra requirements. It is a much bigger program than I originally thought. It’s a simple concept but there are quite a few interactions available on each page and all pages are interlinked and each needs to be refreshed for new messages. There were a lot of speed bumps but that’s all over now.

I can now go through testing and write up the analysis section. I’m behind schedule but I hope to gain a lot of ground this coming week.

During the presentation I was able to show the audience my current prototype and it was great to have some feedback on the user interface as well as the functionality. I will be sure to implement some of the suggestions given.

For the next few days I might implement some of the improvements I could add in the talk as well as refine the aspects that were good.

<school>

<parent name="Jack">
    <child>
        <learnt>abc</learnt>
        <learnt>123</learnt>
    </child>
</parent>

<parent name="Jill">
    <child>
        <learnt>abc</learnt>
    </child>
</parent>

</school>

and what we want to do is to find the child who has learnt “abc” and print the parent’s name. So after initialising, the standard E4X code to filter the xml would be:

xml.parent.(child.learnt.text()=="abc").@name;

But this only returns a result of “Jill” but not “Jack” when Jack is valid. It turns out that to search through multiple nodes on the same level you have to tell it to search through the ‘length’ of the level:

xml.parent.(child.learnt.(text()=="abc").length()).@name;

This applies if you have multiple child under the parent (.length() would correspond to child. and not learnt. as it is now) and so on.

Anyway, things are progressing smoothly again and as it is now it gets it’s users and pictures from the xml data and am up to the initial stages of the contact page. I have retrieved and parsed the contacts relevant to the logged in user but I have noticed that not all users have a url to their pictures and this will be a problem when loading the contacts. I will have to manually add it to the xml file and considering the size of the xml file, this might take some time. Practice talk is next week so I should starting writing that up.

I’ll install FMS and have a play with the recording function and do a bit of coding by next week. Will also take some notes and reading from Gary Marsden’s Mobile Interaction Design as well as Jacob Nielsen’s book.

For next week I will need to prepare a prototype in powerpoint and go through some literature (prototyping, design criteria).

Since the KIT relies on a lot of reusable code/classes I have to be careful and get it right from the start. The KIT primarily have five screens with a lot of going back and forth between them. What I usually do is as soon as the user navigates away from a screen i severe the top most link (parent) and let the garbage collecter clear the memory. I have done a few runs and notice that the memory usage keeps increasing the longer I run the program. I might give council a call and complain.

So for now I have three solutions I will try. The first is that I will not only severe the parent association but I will do the same for every child. Secondly I notice that every time it goes from screen to screen there is a new instantiation, I will re-use the object,  this will hopefully cut down on memory usage. This will mean I have to change how the classes work. And lastly… I can’t remember what the last solution is. I write this so I don’t forget my ideas when I get absorbed into the technicalities of coding but I can’t even remember three things during this post! </rant>

When I do remember I’ll append to this but for now I’ll start going through and applying these changes.

For next week I’ll prepare a more functional prototype with all the pages and links working. For now i’ll finish off my project plan, it’s pretty much done except to add a bit more information for the intro and abstract.

In regards to the presentation of the prototype tomorrow, I haven’t finished making a mockup of each page yet so that’s going to be a drawback but what I’m lacking in quantity I’ve made up for in quality so to speak. I’ve implemented a few animations that could be useful in the final product that could really give it the ‘Wow’ factor.

I’ll try and clean up what I have now instead of trying to implement more content. I might try and draft up another page if I get the time tomorrow.